Regular exercise and a calcium-rich diet could be two ways to help lower the risk of metabolic syndrome, according to a new study.

Metabolic syndrome refers to a cluster of risk factors for diabetes and heart disease—including abdominal obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, low levels of “good” HDL cholesterol and high triglycerides (another type of blood fat). The syndrome is typically diagnosed when a person has three or more of these conditions.

In the new study, of more than 5,000 Illinois adults, researchers found that metabolic syndrome was less common among those who got the recommended amounts of exercise and dietary calcium.

It might not be pleasant, but it could save your life. A new Canadian campaign advocating home screening for colorectal cancer could reduce deaths from the disease by catching it early, when it is often asymptomatic but also highly curable.

The Canadian province of Ontario has one of the world’s highest rates of colorectal cancer, according to the provincial health ministry, and it’s the second deadliest cancer in the province. The disease has a 90-percent cure rate when caught during its early stages but because the cancer is often asymptomatic until it is further progressed, it can be missed.

About 40 percent of the 20,000 Ontarians diagnosed with colon cancer each year will die, said Dr. Philip Branton, scientific director of the Canadian Health Research Institute, in a release.

Mothers who experience violence or aggression at the hands of an intimate partner are at greater risk for maltreating their children than mothers who do not experience intimate partner abuse.

Intimate partner aggression and violence “impacts the whole family, raising health risks for children in the home as well as adult victims,” Dr. Catherine A. Taylor told Reuters Health.

Moreover, the presence of intimate partner aggression and violence appears to confer a unique burden of maltreatment risk to children, Taylor, of Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, in New Orleans, Louisiana, and colleagues have found.

Researchers from Harvard School of Public Health in Boston estimate that between 2000 and 2005 more than 330,000 lives were lost because a “feasible and timely” AIDS drug treatment program was not implemented in South Africa.

By not implementing a mother-to-child transmission HIV prevention program during the same 5-year period, an estimated 35,000 infants were born with HIV.

Dr. Pride Chigwedere and colleagues describe their analyses that generated these estimates in a Perspectives article published online in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes.

Depression increases the risk of death in patients with heart failure, but the risk apparently disappears with antidepressant use, according to a study.

“Recent studies suggest that the use of antidepressants may be associated with increased mortality (death) in patients with cardiac disease,” Dr. Christopher M. O’Connor, of Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina, and colleagues note in the medical journal Archives of Internal Medicine.

“Because depression has also been shown to be associated with increased mortality in these patients, it remains unclear if this association is attributable to the use of antidepressants or to depression.”

Studies have linked prenatal smoking to a higher risk of childhood obesity, but new findings suggest that effect may vary based on race and ethnicity.

In a study of more than 155,000 preschool children, U.S. researchers found that the link between mothers’ smoking during pregnancy and their children’s risk of obesity was most clear among white families.

In contrast, only heavy prenatal smoking was tied to childhood obesity among African Americans. And there was no clear evidence that it raised the odds of obesity among children of Hispanic, Native American or Asian descent.

“Further studies are required to test whether improvements in oral health could affect the onset/progression of the metabolic syndrome or vice-versa,” Dr. Francesco D’Aiuto of the UCL Eastman Dental Institute in London, one of the researchers on the study, told Reuters Health.

Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of risk factors for heart disease, stroke and diabetes—including high blood pressure, abdominal obesity, high blood sugar, low levels of “good” HDL cholesterol and high triglycerides (another type of blood fat). The syndrome is usually diagnosed when a person has three or more of these traits.

A look back at 12 women who developed hernias while pregnant lends support to a “watchful waiting” management strategy during pregnancy, followed by hernia repair after delivery.

Hernia repair after delivery “provides similar results to the non-pregnant population,” report Dr. Celia M. Divino and colleagues from the department of surgery, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York.

The course of hernias in pregnancy, the effect of hernias on delivery, and the timing of hernia repair have not been established, the research team notes.

New research suggests that people who lose weight around their middle, particularly those who are obese, can decrease their odds of developing age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of severe vision loss among elderly people.

“Reduction in risk of AMD may be an additional benefit of reducing weight, especially in obese and overweight patients,” Dr. Tien Y. Wong, from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and co-researchers wrote in report published this month.

Prior research looking at the link between obesity and AMD has yielded conflicting results. In the current study, Wong’s team examined how changes in weight impact the risk of AMD in 12,515 adults between 45 and 64 years old who were followed for 6 years.

Concern that treatment with tamoxifen and other “anti-estrogen” therapies in women with breast cancer may contribute to compromised brain function does not appear to be warranted, at least over the short term, according to a report in the medical journal Cancer.

Anti-estrogen therapy “did not have any significant effects on cognitive function, and I think it is safe to say that patients needn’t worry about cognitive side effects of these medications,” Dr. Kerstin Hermelink from Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, Germany told Reuters Health.

Hermelink and colleagues assessed the effects of hormonal treatment-induced menopause and anti-estrogen therapy on cognitive function in 101 women with breast cancer. They used 12 cognitive tests to assess the patients before the start of cancer therapy, towards the end of chemotherapy, and 1 year after the start of the study.

Nigeria will launch a new campaign to vaccinate millions of children against polio Wednesday in an attempt to curb the spread of the disease that has crippled hundreds this year, the World Health Organization said.

Africa’s most populous country, which accounts for more than 50 percent of new polio cases in the world, has struggled to tame the contagious disease since some states in the mainly Muslim north imposed a year-long vaccine ban in mid-2003.

New polio infections in Nigeria have climbed 225 percent to 751 this year from the same period last year because many children in the north missed several rounds of immunization toward the end of 2007, health officials said.

Women younger than age 65 with diabetes tend to have worse cardiovascular risk profiles than diabetic men of the same age, leading to higher death rates following a heart attack, research shows.

“The female advantage with fewer cardiovascular events than in men at younger ages is attenuated once a woman has the diagnosis of diabetes,” Dr. Anna Norhammar and associates report.

They sought to identify gender-related differences in prognosis, risk factors, or treatment among 25,555 patients younger than age of 65 treated for heart attack between 1995 and 2002. In this cohort, 23 percent were women and 21 percent of women and 16 percent of men were previously diagnosed with diabetes.

The incidence of reddish skin tumors called infantile hemangiomas has grown in recent years, and low birth weight is the leading risk factor driving the increase, new research suggests.

“If we can identify certain factors that put infants at risk for hemangiomas, that helps us understand how to prevent or treat them more appropriately,” study chief Dr. Beth A. Drolet, from the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, told Reuters Health.

Infantile hemangiomas are non-cancerous tumors that can grow rapidly during infancy, but usually resolve by 9 years of age. Hemangiomas are the most common tumors in infants and, aside from cosmetic concerns, most have no medical significance. However, some may cause medical problems or permanent scarring, Drolet and her colleagues point out in the Journal of Pediatrics.